JoJo Recalls Going to Taylor Swift’s House with Selena Gomez and Thinking Everyone ‘Felt Bad for Me’ (Exclusive)

In an exclusive excerpt from JoJo’s upcoming memoir, ‘Over the Influence,’ she writes about finding support in Gomez during a period of career uncertainty

During a period of career uncertainty, Joanna “JoJo” Levesque found support in a friendship with Selena Gomez.

Two decades after rising to fame as a tween with the hit 2004 song “Leave (Get Out),” Levesque is looking back on her life and career so far in her debut memoir, Over the Influence, out Sept. 17, including a years-long period where she was unable to officially release music.

“My whole twenties were just a s—show of confusion,” the 33-year-old performer tells PEOPLE, reflecting on a time where her former label, Blackground Records, did not have a steady distribution deal in place to properly put out music. The label, however, still had the rights to her recorded voice under a contract signed when she was 12 years old.

Fed up with career setbacks that were out of her control, Levesque released two free mixtapes — 2010’s Can’t Take That Away from Me and 2012’s Agapé — online to satiate fans’ hunger for new music, as well as her own desire to share art with the world.

At the same time, she remained at the mercy of the record label, obliging their requests to mold her into a marketable star in hopes of once again putting out music commercially and returning to the heights of her early fame.

“I was just like, ‘Am I this independent spirit who does what they want? Or am I a pawn of the major label systems who are telling me that I need to fit into this box, literally and figuratively?'” recalls Levesque, who writes about going to a weight loss doctor at the label’s suggestion and taking injections (long before the rise of Ozempic) to curb hunger.

“I never made a decision,” she adds. “I didn’t have the courage or stability in other areas of my life to feel confident enough to say, ‘F— y’all, this is just who I am. This is what I’m doing,’ in whatever area because I was very much still needing to have the validation and approval of the major label system, out of fear. I just didn’t know another way.”

“I never made a decision,” she adds. “I didn’t have the courage or stability in other areas of my life to feel confident enough to say, ‘F— y’all, this is just who I am. This is what I’m doing,’ in whatever area because I was very much still needing to have the validation and approval of the major label system, out of fear. I just didn’t know another way.”

Around the time I was introduced to yoga, a mutual friend, Francia Raisa, introduced me to Selena Gomez and we all started hanging.

Sel came to a few of my studio sessions, and I swung by hers to hang out or write together. It was honestly a breath of fresh air to be around someone who had started in this industry at such a young age, just like me, and was still so down to earth and open.

I can’t lie; I felt the occasional twinge of pain or jealousy at the outward differences in our lives and careers, but then I’d quickly reel myself back in: the level of fame she had was overwhelming to me. She couldn’t go anywhere without security flanking her and fans mobbing her at every corner. It just seemed like there was no sense of freedom for her to explore the world and be wherever and whoever she wanted to be. I imagined that must be suffocating.

It made me grateful for the relative anonymity I had whenever I walked down the street.